Computer Archives

Deciding to take a break from using full-size modern computers for a month or two, but not giving up the Internet. Still staying online using an iPod Touch.

This sabbatical was motivated by over-use of my computer as an entertainment device (streaming video, games). Also inspired by some Buddhist concepts and a long-term plan to upgrade to a faster computer. Once I figure out what I’m going to intentionally create with a new machine, I’ll pick one operating system (Linux, Windows or Mac) and get a serious upgrade.

This video is about the HP Mini 1000 netbook and how it performs with Lubuntu. The “mobile internet” desktop interface is shown first, then I erase it and install the 32 bit Intel version of Lubuntu Linux (download link). We then see how it plays streaming video using the flash player, on both YouTube and Hulu.

One thing I left out of the last video, a display of Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin running on an ancient PowerPC iBook with a pitiful 366MHx G3 processor. For what it’s worth, here it is. The Unity desktop shown after booting from the Live CD.

The loading times have been edited out of the video, so it doesn’t appear to be horribly slow, but it really is.

I installed Lubuntu on my clamshell iBook to see if I could use a modern web browser on this laptop computer. I was using OS X Panther, whch works great on this old machine, but I was stuck with Firefox 2, and iTunes 8. With Lubuntu 12.04 I could try the latest Firefox, and transferring files off my iPod touch – something that is not possible under Mac OS Panther.

I also tried the standard Ubuntu with the Unity desktop. It looked good on the small screen actually, but was too slow to be usable. This was not a surprise of course, I didn’t expect it to be fast on 366MHz.

Then I installed Lubuntu with the LXDE desktop, which was created to be more efficient than Ubuntu. This video shows how it works on the iBook. Short answer – the speed is okay but the wifi didn’t work and there are weird graphical glitches on the screen.

If you want to know why I’m bothering to mess with such an old computer, there are two answers.
1. Nostalgia – this was my first laptop computer.
2. The keyboard. I’m a keyboard geek and this is a joy to type on.

Trying out the Blur All Faces tool on YouTube, which is supposed to let you obscure the identities of individuals within your video. This video tests the filter on my face, my face with sunglasses, and a couple drawings of faces on paper. CLick these images to see the drawings I used to try and fool the face detector on YouTube:

On-page SEO for Youtube Videos can get you more views. When you use techniques of SEO on YouTube, your videos are more likely to appear in the search results when people type your key phrase into the search box. Off-page SEO is mostly about getting people to link to your video page, which is a topic for another video.

Search Engine Optimization is usually for websites, but the techniques can also be applied to Youtube video pages. When you do SEO for Youtube, choose a specific keyword phrase that you want to rank for and include it in four places on your video. These four places are described in this video. Enjoy!